How policy documents (re)produce the cycling citizen
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Cycling is often promoted as a low cost, accessible and virtuous solution to many urban transport problems, including air pollution and congestion. It is also pedalled as a strategy for solving public health issues created by modern urban living, such as the constructed crisis of the ‘obesity epidemic’, and a way to address the looming threat of climate change. Thus cycling is heralded as a sustainable mobility capable of addressing a range of social, environmental, economic and personal issues. Yet the status of cycling as a quick and easy transport solution to these ills has rarely been problematised. Much of the academic and policy literature exploring the adoption or rejection of cycling as a personal mode of transport has focussed on the role of the quality and availability of physical infrastructure, perceptions of traffic and hazards, and local urban form and streetscape. This emphasis has also dominated transport planning and policy efforts to increase cycling mode share. While these factors are undeniably important influences in individual travel behaviour and decisions, the social, psychological, cultural and contextual factors that influence cycling behaviour and modal choice have been less well explored.
In countries like Australia where cycling remains a very low proportion of total trips by mode, the ‘cyclist’ has become an identity in and of itself; an identity that sits more comfortably and consistently with some than others, in turn shaping travel practices and choices. This research explores the limited and limiting ways in which the cycling citizen is reflected in, and indeed constructed by, transport policy and planning documents, and how this may shape decisions to (or not to) cycle.
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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